


The Mountain Goat

by crossingwinter



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 13:53:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2734970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I’ve heard that you are a Wandering Wolf, but I see that you are not.” She begins to walk the path, picking her way through the snow and the stone.  “Only a man.”</p>
<p>“I am a wolf,” he says quickly, and she hears snow crunching behind her.  “I am Rodrik Stark, of Winterfell.”</p>
<p>“I am Arya Flint,” she laughs, and remembers her uncle’s words.  “And I am a mountain.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mountain Goat

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rumaan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rumaan/gifts).



> This drabble is an extension of one that I wrote for this year's [November drabble project](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2550200) which just wouldn't leave my head once I'd put it down.

His father's mother's mother had been a Flint of the mountains.  Old Nan once said that it was her blood in him that made Bran such a fool for climbing before his fall.  She had died years and years and years before he was born, though, even before his father had been born.

 \- Bran,  _A Storm of Swords_

 

 

“They call him the Wandering Wolf,” her father had said over dinner, reaching for his cup of pine brandy,  “Bleeding pompous name if ever I’ve heard one.”

“He must be a wanderer to come this far into the hills,” her younger brother Bern had responded thickly through a mouthful of stew. He dribbled some of it into his half-grown whiskers.

“These Starks, calling themselves the this wolf, and the that wolf. It’s as silly as if I called myself the Wandering Mountain, isn’t it?” she’d heard her uncle say.

“What could he want?” her mother had snapped. “He’ll fall off the mountain if he’s not careful, and Starks are never careful with their climbing.”

Arya watches him come, watches him pick his way up the mountain path leading his horse and one hand against the rock face. He is taller than she’d expected. To hear her father speak of it, Starks are not so tall, for there is no mountain in their blood.  She cannot see his face at all, he is so swaddled in scarves, his cloak wrapped tight about his body and belted shut. At least Starks seem to know how to gird themselves for winter.  She supposes she shouldn’t be surprised by that, though to hear her father speak of it, they know nothing of the wind and ice of the mountains, and for all of their “Winter is Coming” their version of a winter is not half so harsh as what they know on Flint.  She wonders if he says that because Bern was not old enough to go to the winter town for food this year, and they’d had to rely upon The Norrey and the stores he’d sent over before he’d come for Yanna.

She could have gone—she could have. But her father wouldn’t have let her, and besides, that would have involved leaving Flint, and while she would happily have left Flint the father, leaving Flint the mountain had never been even a remotely appealing idea.

Arya watches him come closer and closer until she hears him make a sound of surprise and he calls, “Hey! Girl!”

She cocks her head, smiling.  He would think her a girl, she supposes. She’s far enough away, and wrapped in her own cloak, but she’s too old to be a girl now.  The Norrey had been clear to say so when he’d supped at their table a moon past, commenting on how The Flint’s girl had grown a fine set of teats.  “Like the mountains, they are!” he’d bellowed in his cups, and her father had laughed while Arya had blushed and slumped down in her seat because they were hardly as big as Yanna’s—hardly mountains at all—and besides, she did not want everyone to stare at them. But the Wandering Wolf would have had no way of seeing them beneath her furs.

“How far until I reach Lord Flint’s holdings?” he calls to her.  “Lord Flint,” he names her father.  Perhaps he has simply never wandered in this part of the North, and doesn’t know any better.

Arya smiles down at him.  “Well, if you take the road, you’ve got another half a day.” She doesn’t hear him groan above the wind, though from the way his body twists she can tell the news is not quite welcome.

“There is no faster way?” he calls back.

“If you scale the mountain,” she responds, cocking her head and looking up the rock face.  She’d climbed Flint for years—in snow, in rain, in sunshine. She knows the footholds and the resting places and, more importantly, knows that home is only an hour away once you reach the top of the rock face.

“I could not leave my horse,” he curses.

“No, you could not,” she agrees and she gets to her feet and climbs quickly down the road.  “But at least, I shall keep you company along the way.  It will be faster—I know where the road is.”

She sees his eyes, grey like the sky overhead, widen slightly.

She tilts her head and suppresses a smile. “I’ve heard that you are a Wandering Wolf, but I see that you are not.” She begins to walk the path, picking her way through the snow and the stone.  “Only a man.”

“I am a wolf,” he says quickly, and she hears snow crunching behind her.  “I am Rodrik Stark, of Winterfell.”

“I am Arya Flint,” she laughs, and remembers her uncle’s words.  “And I am a mountain.”

* * *

He sees now that he had been mistaken. She was not a girl at all. She stands near as tall as him, and even marching up the mountain, he notes the swing of her hips, wide as her shoulders and womanly enough.   She is very sure of herself, he thinks, but then, he has always wondered why it is that people assume that girls _wouldn’t_ be sure of themselves—especially this far away from the world. It seems like everywhere he went in the south expected girls to be delicate little things, but they had clearly never met his sister Berena and the knife she kept in her belt alongside the keys to the library.

Her feet are precise along the ridge—far more so than his had been.  But that does not surprise him all too much.  She had been sitting on a ledge of rock barely wide enough for a man to sit. Of course she knows how to handle the mountains. 

“You are Lord Flint’s daughter?” he asks her, and she laughs and casts a glance over her shoulder at him.

“Lord is for the lowlands,” she calls to him over the whistling wind.  “Though I doubt my father would take ill to it.  He is called _The_ Flint in these parts.”

Rodrik slaps himself across the forehead. “Of course!  I knew that.” He feels stupid having forgotten. "Honorifics are difficult to keep straight," he tells her in a huff. "It took many years to learn the honorifics while I was across the sea."

"You were across the sea?" she asks, her voice no longer laughing, now filled with wonder and he swells with pride. He wonders if Arya Flint has ever met someone who has seen half-so-much of the world as he has. It would not surprise him if she had not.  He knows well enough from his lessons with Maester Adric that the clans of the mountains do not often bestir themselves without great cause.  “That is for the good, of course,” Rodrik remembers Maester Adric saying.  Rodrik had been only a boy then, eight, or nine, and about to be fostered up in Karhold, “for once the Clans fight, they fight hard—nearly as barbarically as the wildlings north of the Wall.  Their infighting is a terrible thing.  Your father has worked very hard to keep arguments from coming to blows between them.”

So Rodrik smiles a little as he tells her, "I have traveled all through the disputed lands of Essos. I served with the Second Sons for a time."

"What are the Second Sons?” she sounds curious, and amused, her voice somehow carrying over the wind.  He wonders briefly if his own does before she continues. “It sounds like a club for those who shan't inherit their fathers' seats."

He deflates. "It is a company of warriors." He senses she would not take well to the word sellsword, and some part of him wishes to impress this goat-footed girl. She has to have some goat blood in her, he thinks, for only a goat could climb a mountain so surely. He’d seen some goats making their way up a cliff that had been practically flat, and it was not the sort of sight to forget.  _And men talk of monkeys climbing_ , he thinks. In these mountains, surely having goat-feet proves more useful.

"Ah. And so in learning all the titles of the Essos lands," he does not correct her, though he wants to, "You forgot that those of the mountains use a single, different honorific? And not even a hard one at that!"

He scowls at her, and her laughter dances around him.

* * *

She decides as they pass the fork towards Deadman’s Peak that she likes this Wandering Wolf.  Not the like that occurs because he is a stranger and she is guiding him to her home—a different sort of like.  The sort of like that comes in finding a man who knows when it is right to laugh.

When The Norrey had come and taken Yanna away from them to be his bride and mother to his sons, he had not laughed at the right times.  He had laughed making mark of her teats, and he had laughed when her mother had pointed out that he’d dribbled his milkmead down the front of his doublet, and he’d laughed when her father had suggested perhaps speaking to The Liddle of Arya, but he had not laughed when Yanna had spoken, when Yanna had tried to make him smile. He had hardly seemed to listen to her, and Arya did not like that.  Yanna was the beautiful sister, the one who always came home when called, and who helped their mother run the Hall when mother was feeling glum and grey. Yanna is kind, and good, and patient, and gentle, and when she tries to make you smile—you _smile_. 

But The Norrey had not smiled.  He hadn’t even taken note of her, and the next morning, Yanna had blushed a plenty while he made bawdy jokes of that first night as man and wife, but Arya thought she had seen the tracemarks of tears on her sister’s face. 

Arya had decided then that she would not marry The Liddle’s son unless he laughed at the right things.

And the Wandering Wolf does.  He laughs when she tells him that the Starks know nothing of winter, for where snows might fall in Winterfell, they seem to grow from the ground up here on Flint.  He is warmly grateful that she warns him of narrow pathways up ahead, and tends to his horse with care when the way is very narrow.  And, best of all, he doesn’t hesitate to tell her a bawdy joke when she asks him if he has many enemies in the Essos lands.

“The Golden Company used to call me ‘The Westerosi Shit,’” he laughs, and how warm it sounds, and she wonders if that warmth is an Essos warmth, or a Winterfell warmth, for it is a different warmth than the warmth found in the Hall of Flint.  “I think they meant to deride me, though I take it as a compliment, since they all clearly shat their breeches at the very thought of me.”

“Did you make them shit their breeches?” she asks. The thought of it seems so alien—this laughing man hardly seems the sort to cause such terror. She knows that the Wull’s third son Donnel says he wants nothing more in life than to make someone shit himself in fear. 

“Well, the Golden Company always did have a certain stench about them after we fought,” he says lightly, and they laugh again, and Arya asks before it is too late,

“What is the Golden Company?”

“You do not know of—“ he cuts himself off. “Forgive me, my lady, I had not thought the need to explain.  Across the sea, there are bands of warriors who fight on behalf of some of the cities.  The Golden Company is one of the finest there is, all swords from men who were once of the Seven Kingdoms.”

“Why do the cities not fight for themselves? Have they no honor?” she asks.

“They consider it honorable to hire others to fight for them.”

“And you were one of these men?  They paid you gold to fight for them?”

She is waiting for him to lead his horse over a small stone bridge.  It is nearly dark now, though that hardly matters.  It is a clear night, and the snow illuminates in the moonlight, and he is silent as he focuses on his horse, and Arya knows that he is thinking of what it is that he will say next.  She wants it not to be true, wants him not to have sold his sword.  Such was not befitting a Stark of Winterfell, perhaps, and this laughing man—she wants him to be a man of honor, and selling your sword is not honor.

“For a time,” he says at last and he is standing very close to her now, and he is looking at her right in the eyes and, for a moment, she feels her breath catch and almost without her bidding them her hands rise to grip the belt that keeps the coat she wears under her cloak secure. “No longer, though. I—not any longer.”

* * *

The Flint sups him well, on a stew of goat and beets and potatoes.  He even thinks he tastes a hint of cardamom and mint—an odd combination to be sure, but he supposes that so far away from civilization, the Flints must make the best of what they have. 

The Flint is a broad man who reminds him of his own father, large, and loud.

“Minka, where has Grom gotten to?  Or is he scared of the Wandering Wolf? And have you not finished with Edd Wull?  Where is the damned boy.  He’ll want to meet the guest, or The Stark will have his father down from the mountains and take his head with that big dragonsteel sword of his.  Har!  That’d be a sight. I’d follow him down the mountains just to watch Wull’s ass get handed to him and left out for the wolves to eat. Wull’s my wife’s brother. I say this in jest. And where is my little goat? Where’s she gone off to? Brought him up the mountain and now she runs and hides?  Has she gotten all glum again?  Eat up, eat up. There’s plenty of food here. Our game hasn’t been so depleted, and Yanna’s dowry was only a quarter of our goats—plenty to get us through the winter, especially as the nights are getting shorter already. Eat up.  Eat up.  Have you ever had spices like this?  Got them off a trader that came north from the Summer Isles and thought that Bear Island might like a bit of mint.  Har! As if those bears don’t grow enough of their own over there. Got him to sell it nice and cheap too.”

Rodrik hardly has a chance to get a word in edgewise, and ends up having three bowls of the stew, for he knows not how to voice his protests.  When he is so full he could burst, he catches sight of Arya, slipping into the Hall, snow in her hair and her eyes seeming to glitter in the dark. 

“Where’ve you gone to, Goaty?” The Flint asks her, and Rodrik sees the way her lips purse slightly, but she goes and stands by his father, who wraps his arm around her waist.  “My Goaty girl brought you up Flint, didn’t she? Where were you before then?”

Arya looks down her nose at her father, and opens her mouth, taking a breath and pauses. 

“What is it, girl?” asks The Flint.

“You’ve got stew in your beard,” she says to him, and The Flint laughs, and wipes his sleeve against his mouth. 

“Are your sisters half so unruly? I swear, this one causes me more trouble than she’s worth.”

Arya smirks down at her father.  “Oh, but I’m worth every bit, father.”

“Aye.  Aye, I know that,” he sighs.  “Anyway.  Where’ve you been off to?”

“I was writing Yanna.”

“Yanna!” The Flint belches a laugh. “Yanna’s newly wed and has plenty to occupy her without you sending letters asking her to come and do your stitching for you.”

“And yet I was writing her,” Arya says, hands now on her hips.  They are wide hips—wider than a girl her age should have, in truth, Rodrik thinks. Wider certainly than any of his sisters.  He hadn’t noticed while she’d been wrapped in furs and a cloak, but they almost seem too big for her slim frame.

He misses what Arya was saying entirely and is only brought back to the conversation when The Flint bursts out laughing. “You like my girl’s hips, do you Stark?”  He feels his face grow warm, and Arya’s eyes dart to his, and if he had any command of his gaze at all, he would drop his gaze to his hands, or to his stew, but he does not. Instead he stares at her. She has grey eyes too, but less steely, more…more green somehow.  Like stone with the fragments of moss growing on it.  And as her face grows more flushed, that green becomes more pronounced and he forces himself to listen to The Flint’s words instead of notice just how pretty she is.  “You’re not the first, nor will you be the last.” He claps Arya on the rear and she bites back a squeak.  “She’ll have sons, this one.  Good fine ones. I’m practically fighting clansmen off to keep her in my Hall a little while longer.”

“Quite a fighter you must be,” Rodrik manages to say when he realizes that the silence has stretched longer than he should have. “There must be hundreds of men out for her hand.”

That makes The Flint snort.  “Aye.  Her hand.”  He claps her on the rear again with a significant glance, then laughs again. 

When Rodrik looks at her again, he sees that the smile is gone from her gaze, and she is no longer looking at him, but rather just over his shoulder.  The flush has faded and she’s pale, paler than he has seen her before, for when he was freshly arrived in The Flint’s hall, her cheeks had been rosy from the cold and wind. 

“Aye, her hand,” The Flint repeats. “The gods gave me four daughters to dower away, and only one son.”  He jerks his head to the sullen, long-faced boy next to him who has hardly said a word all night.  “Yanna’s the prettiest, and the younger two are stubborn little things, but none of them are half so stubborn and troublesome as my goat girl.”  He smiles up at his daughter again, and her cheeks twitch in a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.  “She’s nothing special to look at, of course. But she’s mine.”

* * *

The Wandering Wolf wakes before all of them, it seems, and Arya always finds him in the kitchens when she stumbles in, her hair half braided and her mother’s chided instructions of “Be sure to finish the sweater that you promised your brother.  And have you started the stockings?  If not, you might use the summer wool of Ines’ goats—it was softer and will make them itch less in your boots.  And _please_ don’t disappear today—I need your help with the dyeing,” ringing in her ears. He’s quiet in the mornings, eating his dried oatcakes sullenly, his grey eyes thoughtful.  His face is long, and somehow, it doesn’t feel like a long face on him is an ugliness.  He looks more wolfish, and her long face only makes her look more like a goat, and it’s better to be a wolf than a goat, for at least then you don’t get eaten.

“You are always so quiet in the mornings,” she says to him one day as he is halfway through his second oatcake.  His lips twitch in a smile and that makes her glad. His morning sullenness is not like her father’s when he’s had too much of the pine brandy and can’t bear the sound of a door closing lest it split his head.

“I had a commander across the sea who could not abide my talk before the sun was up when I was in his service.”

Arya feels her eyes widen.  “But in winter, that can be so late!” she exclaims. Garth glances at her from the stew-pot and she claps her hands over her mouth.  “Sorry, Garth.  I’ll not be so loud.”

“Best not, Goaty,” he tells her, and she knows it’s only because he’s peeved that she’s loud that he calls her that. Most everyone knows she doesn’t like it—everyone except her father, but her father doesn’t seem to know her at all.  He keeps telling of how he’d have her off to Bear Isle if he could convince old Lord Jon that her hips were as wide as he claimed.  She hates her wide hips.  And her long goaty face.

The Wandering Wolf smiles at her in commiseration, and he murmurs, “Aye—in winter it’s late.  But in the disputed lands, even in winter, the days are longer. Warmer too.”  He smiles wistfully.  “I must say I do not miss the warm winters of the disputed lands.”

“Why did you leave?” she asks him.

He only shrugs.  “I’ve always wanted to see the world.  There’s so much of it.” 

That gives her pause.  Arya has never wanted to see the world—she’s hardly wanted to climb Liddle, even though it’s just on the other side of the Deerskin Valley. She’s only ever known Flint, and only ever wanted to know it better.  She doesn’t think anyone knows Flint half-so-well as she does—not even her father. Flint is _hers_ , and she knows all its secrets.

She wonders if the Wandering Wolf has learned all the secrets of wherever he’s been, or if he’s just learned one and assumed that was enough.

After he breaks his fast, he always goes out into the yard and teaches Bern the fighting he learned across the sea. Fighting across the sea is much more about speed and much less about hacking people with axes, and Arya watches while she knits.  She likes watching him fight with her brother, watching him pause, and correct Bern’s form, watching the curve of his body and the way, as he grows warmer and warmer, he sheds layers of furs and woolens until he’s in little more than a layer of wool and velvet.  His body is different from Bern’s and from her father’s.  It’s slimmer, lither and sometimes, she finds that she’s staring at parts of him that aren’t even close to his sword arm and feeling herself grow warm. 

He catches her looking, sometimes.  And she pretends that she was gazing off into nothing, bored while knitting.  But she finishes a sleeve within two days while he fights with her brother, and moves on to the first of the stockings her mother has been trying to convince her to make since autumn ended.  _Mayhaps I will give them to him_ , she thinks wildly, and it makes her sad.  _He won’t want them.  Don’t be stupid.  He doesn’t want anything to remember you by, Goaty._

* * *

He can’t quite tell if she’s everywhere or if he’s just noticing her whenever she’s there.  She is at breakfast, lunch, and dinner; she watches while she knits in the practice yards; even when The Flint is walking with him through the wilder parts of the forests that cover Flint, he thinks he sees a shadow of her, her long dark braid swinging behind her as she walks along the ridges, hopping across brooks that have frozen in the winter with the sort of surety that only a creature of the forest could have. 

She is like a wild creature, he thinks, one day as he sees her footprints and knows that she’s ahead.  _We stalk now the wild Arya, native only to Flint and a rarer creature than a dragon. She knows the forest well, and can, sometimes, be lured into the company of humans if there is good wool for knitting._ The errant thought makes him smile to himself.

He doesn’t even know if she likes knitting—he just sees her always knitting, it seems.  She has finished a pair of stockings and has now moved on to some sort of circular thing that she is making with five needles.  He has never seen anyone knit with five needles—not even Alysanne, who loves everything to do with needlework.  He’d sent her some Myrish Lace while he was across the sea, and had received a letter from Berena not long afterwards saying that she was trying to replicate it using two strands of wool, without much success. Rodrik cannot see Arya seeking to replicate Myrish Lace, but she certainly seems to enjoy keeping her fingers moving as she watches him train Bern.

He obsesses over it.  He wonders how it is that such a girl, such a mountain goat always wandering, always moving about can also like to knit.  So he asks her.

And he should not be surprised when she laughs, but he is.  “I don’t,” she replies. “I don’t love it. I don’t hate it. I just do it.  I have been trained in it as long as you have been trained in swordplay.”

He snorts.  “I have been trained in swordplay longer than you’ve been alive, I’ll warrant.”

She raises her eyebrows.  “Oh?”

“Yes.”

“How old are you then, Rodrik?”  It is the first time she’s called him by his name—no Wandering Wolf or Stark or Lord Sellsword, as she’d japed up the mountain on his first day on Flint. 

“I am near eight and twenty, my lady.”

“My lady?  And since when have I been my lady?” she teases.

Rodrik rolls his eyes.  “Forgive me, I had forgotten with whom I speak.” He is tempted to call her the mountain goat, but he’s seen the way she bites her lip when her father calls her Goaty and so resists.  He can see the ill intent behind the fondness, and wonders just how deeply she has been hurt by it, if “Goaty” stings as much as “runt” does when it fell from Donnor’s lips.  “I am near eight and twenty,” he repeats lamely.

Arya cocks her head to the side and narrows her eyes. “You do not look it,” she says. “You look far younger than that.”

“Well,” He reaches up and runs a hand over his chin. It is clean-shaven, as it has been for years.  He has never been able to grow a full beard as rich and luscious as Errold’s, and Errold was barely two years his elder.  But he was runt, and he would always be the weakling of the family.  “A beard ages a man, but why would a man want to age?” he tries to smile, but he feels that it is forced and he wonders if she can tell.  He can see when her smiles are forced, but then again, he feels as though he notices everything about her, down to the way she will steal pieces of cheese from the kitchens when she thinks no one is looking. 

“I don’t know,” she says lightly and then, to his surprise, she reaches up and touches the skin of his cheek and gods but her hand is warm, as it trembles against his face.  “I—forgive me.”  Her hand drops at once and she blushes furiously and turns away from him, and Rodrik reaches for her and catches her by the sleeve.  She could easily have pulled away from him, but she doesn’t. 

“How old are you, Arya?” he asks her.

“I am seventeen,” she replies, and she almost sounds sad of it.

“A good age,” he says, trying to sound jovial. He does not like it when she sounds sad.

“Young,” she sighs.  Only then does she tug her sleeve from his grip, and only then does she make her way into the Hall.  She does not run.  She walks with purpose and her hips don’t sway and he wonders if it’s the wind or if he hears the sound of tears.

-

She has missed Yanna before now, she has missed her intensely, especially at nights when she is alone in the bed they had once shared.  But she has not missed Yanna before as she misses Yanna now, because she could have cried onto Yanna’s shoulder and Yanna would have brushed her hair and listened to her and given her such a hug and told her not to be afraid.

It isn’t his admiration she is afraid of—hardly that. She is pleased with it, the looks of amusement he seems to share with just her, or the way his expression always seems to brighten when she enters a room. Perhaps she merely imagines it though.  Perhaps she wants to see it, because seeing him smile like that makes the day seem less grey. No, it is not his admiration she fears, nor even his age.  Yanna’s husband is nearly twice her age, and Father is older than mother. Men often want a younger woman, especially one with good hips like hers, good hips for bearing sons…

It’s that she feels dark sometimes.   She feels numb, as though the joy she feels when she sees him fades away and in its absence, there is the true absence, the winter absence, the absence that makes it hard to smile or taste her dinner.  Yanna would brush her hair and hold her while she slept and tell her that the two are not the same.  Yanna would simply tell her that being in love is like that—for of course she was in love, and Arya would roll her eyes, and pinch her sister’s side and they’d both giggle because everyone knew that Arya wouldn’t fall in love with anything but the mountain. 

She wants to be in love with him, she thinks. She wants to hold him close, to touch his face as she had when he had asked her if she liked to knit. His skin had been so smooth, and warm, and her breath had caught in her chest, and her stomach seems to tighten and the only way to make it stop is to take a deep breath and let the emptiness overtake her again.

* * *

The Flint takes him on a week-long expedition to Wull to meet his wife’s brother and down the mountain they go. It is faster going down, and he doesn’t have his horse to lead this time, and sometimes he looks out over the valley and feels this fantastic exhilaration that is almost like seeing the ranks of an oncoming army.   What a sight to see every day, the earth stretching out for miles beneath you. It is nothing at all like Winterfell, with its moors that are covered in snow in winter and in mist in spring. In all his travels, he’d never looked for mountains.  He’d only ever seen the seas, and the flats of the disputed lands, and the rocky coast of the Stormlands.  He had almost gone to the Vale once, but in the end the draw wasn’t worth it. Going to the Vale would mean he would have to visit his mother’s people, and he had not wanted to stay long in any place at that time, especially not in a place where there would be news of him sent home.

_I wanted to have my name drift home in hints of awe,_ he thinks as he follows The Flint down the mountain.  _But even that wouldn’t stop them calling me runt._  

The Flint is wider than his daughter, his shoulders brushing against the rock.  His feet are sure enough, but not so nimble, not so agile.  A part of Rodrik think that that is to be expected—The Flint is old, and a warrior, and a man.  But in truth, none of the party are half so easy on these roads as Arya is, and he wonders if they aren’t all more like a horse than like a mountain goat.  The thought makes him smile.

She is waiting for them on the same ledge she was when they make their way back up the mountain a week later, stomachs full of venison and heads still throbbing from the pine brandy that The Wull had given them at every meal.

“You shirking off helping your mother?” The Flint shouts up at her.

“No more than you,” she shoots back, and the party laughs.

“Half a day remaining, then?” Rodrik calls before The Flint thinks of what else to say.

“Unless you climb,” she glances up the face of stone. “You haven’t a horse this time.”

Rodrik casts a glance at The Flint, who is now adjusting his cloak to better cover him against the wind.  “You’ll freeze your fingers off and may well fall to your death, but go on.  No one climbs so well as Goaty.”  There’s something odd in The Flint’s tone, and Rodrik pauses to consider it for a moment.

“Never would have thought that The Westerosi Shit would be afraid of climbing,” Arya teases, and that goads him enough to search for some handholds and tug himself up next to her. 

“Don’t let him die, Goaty, I’d hate for The Stark to come up and have my head for killing his little brother.”

_Willam wouldn’t have your head,_ Rodrik thinks, _But he’d care at least that I was gone.  It’s Donnor who would laugh, and Donnor’s dead now_.   You aren’t supposed to be glad of hearing that your brother has died.  But he had felt no sadness when he had gotten off his ship in White Harbor.  It had been the first thing that Lord Manderly had said, “Stark, I am sorry for your loss,” as if losing Donnor was so terrible.  _He never stopped thinking of me as runt_. _And now he never will._

He finds Arya on her feet on the ledge, and there’s barely enough room for the both of them, and she’s very close—closer than she’s ever been before.

“First rule of climbing,” Arya says. “Don’t fall.”

“I think I could have guessed that one,” he snorts.

“Second rule of climbing,” Arya continues, ignoring him.  “Don’t look down past your feet.  I can, but I’m good at climbing.  You can’t because you’ll get all dizzy and scared.”

He feels a smile tug at his cheeks. “I will not.”

“You will.  Everyone does.  Everyone except me.”  She smiles up at him cheerily, her grey green eyes dancing before she turns and faces the wall.

He does not look down, though.  He knows enough of himself to know that the sight of him with nothing below but a sharp drop and hard stone will not keep him calm. She moves quickly ahead of him—far faster than he thinks he can, and though his muscles begin to scream at him after a little while, she makes no complaints at all, and does not seem to slow.  _How strong she must be_ , he marvels. _I wonder if she even knows it._

The hardest part of the climb doesn’t take as long as he thinks it will in the end, in no small part because Arya makes him climb fast.  And when they reach the top of the cliff and the pine forest full of snow, he’s out of breath and his arms hurt and Arya’s eyes are bright and her cheeks are flushed and her lips are chapped from the wind, and he suppresses a groan because he should like very much to chap her lips, to kiss her senseless until they are both panting and breathing hard, and wondering just how far they’ll go before one of them will pull away.

It is then that he knows he’s in too far—in too far, and lost, because even as she pats him on the shoulder and tells him that he did a good job and didn’t embarrass himself too badly, he can’t get the thought of kissing that smirk off her face out of his head.

* * *

He’s to leave in a week.  She heard him telling father over dinner, and she has not smiled at all since.  He’s to leave in a week, and she’ll stop feeling special—she’ll start feeling like Goaty again.  He doesn’t make her feel like Goaty at all.  He almost makes her feel beautiful, and he certainly makes her feel special.

And he’ll be gone in a week, and she’ll never see him again, and Father will send her off to The Liddle’s son with a herd of goats and birthing hips, and she doesn’t even _want_ to go to Liddle.

_What do I want, though?  He wouldn’t stay—he’s of Winterfell.  And I don’t want to leave the mountain._

_But I could with him.  I could. I could wander too._

It makes her even sadder, and she stares into the fire for a long while, even as the Hall begins to empty as people yawn and drift off to bed.

“My father used to say a man’s thoughts are never happy when he stares into a fire that long.”  She had not heard him approach, and closes her eyes, feeling the warmth of the flame on her face. 

“I’m sad that you will be leaving,” she says.

He sighs and sits down next to her. “It is for the best, I think,” he says.

“What does that mean?”  She wishes she didn’t sound so small, wishes her voice didn’t sound like she was going to cry, but she knows that if he leaves she’ll just feel empty again, and she doesn’t like feeling empty as spring comes. If she’s empty when spring comes, she’s empty all through until the next spring, and she could not bear that.

He sighs again and looks at her and her gaze drops back to the flames.  “You are young, Arya.  Young, and kind, and good.  And if I thought you’d go with me, if you’d leave these mountains, I would ask you to come with me, and be my wife in Winterfell, or anywhere.  I could show you Volantis and their great elephants that walk the streets, or watch you eat a starfruit on the Summer Isles, or simply breathe the air of the sea for the first time.  But I cannot fathom you away from Flint.  Your father says you would never want to leave. So I go.  I cannot stay here with you as we are, and the longer I linger…” 

She hears him swallow and turns to stare at him, and his long face is so forlorn that for a moment she wants to laugh.

“You leave to keep your own heart from breaking?” she asks quietly.

“Either way my heart will break.  But I think staying will make it worse, though…though I wish I didn’t have to leave quite so soon.  But It’s for the best.”

Her gaze drops some, drops to his throat, where she sees the apple bobbing as he swallows, to the silver direwolf pin at his collar. She reaches up and touches it. The metal is cool.

“Why me?  Why would you want to take me?  I’m stubborn, and I eat everything, and I have the face of a goat and—”

“Is that why you hate that name so much?” His hand rises to hold hers and she shivers because his hands are colder than the silver pin but suddenly she feels warm.

“Wouldn’t you?” she demands.  “It is not meant as a kindness.  It seems that way, but I know that it’s not—it never has been.  Not when they called Yanna catlike and graceful and beautiful.”

He smiles a small smile and squeezes her hand. “My brothers called me runt.”

“Runt?  But you’re tall!” she exclaims in surprise.

“I’m the smallest and the youngest,” he sighs. “Even Alysanne is taller than me. And as far as I could sail, I could not stop being runt to them.  No matter how many men I fought, or how many languages I learned, I was still runt. You though…you are not Goaty. You’re a mountain goat, who can climb anything and who is fierce and brave.  Goats are the best climbers there are, and if you’re Goaty, you’re that kind of Goaty.  And…” he swallows again and she sees a blush creep onto his face, “Your face isn’t Goaty at all.  It’s lovely.”

Her fingers tighten around his direwolf pin, and she feels her heart swelling, swelling past her chest, past her chest so that it pounds in her throat, in her soul and she tugs his collar down and a moment later she’s kissing him.  His fingers come up and trace the length of her cheeks, and she squeaks because he’s slipping his tongue into her mouth and for all the times she’d snuck kisses from Grenn to see what kissing was even like, she’d never felt a tongue against hers, and her heart beats faster, faster, faster, until she’s sure she’ll explode with happiness.

* * *

Would that he were anyone but a Stark of Winterfell. Would that he were a pikeman from Tyrosh, or even a Liddle of the mountains, because if he were anyone but a Stark of Winterfell, he would never have stopped kissing her. They are alone in the Hall, with only the crackling of the flames and each other to make any noise, and her fingers are threaded through his hair, and his hands are at her waist and gods but he could kiss her forever and die a happy man.

But he is a Stark of Winterfell, and no matter how far from home he has travelled, he cannot forget the weight of that, not even when Arya tentatively sticks her tongue into his mouth for the first time and he feels it all the way down in his manhood.  He is a Stark of Winterfell, and he will not dishonor her. If he were anyone else, he’d kiss her and more, if she were willing, and she certainly seems it enough the longer her lips move against his own.  He is a Stark of Winterfell, and he should end this.  He should—he really should, but he doesn’t, not as her hands depart his hair and cup his chin, drop to his chest so that one rests just above his pounding heart. 

And gods she could cut it out of him if she wanted, for he would give it to her completely if she wanted it.

* * *

“I knew he was after you—just knew it.  Why else would he spend so much time with you, if not to try and win you for Winterfell?   Well, Goaty, I’m happy for you—as happy as I can be, though you’ll be far from the mountains with nothing to climb.”

She had not thought of that.  She had not thought of it at all—only of convincing her father to let her marry Rodrik Stark because she wanted to. She’d never wanted to leave the mountain before, but he made it all seem so much more exciting than she’d ever dreamed.  They had kissed their way through the night, and Arya had never been more sure of anything than that she was that she would go to Winterfell with Rodrik Stark and be his wife, and maybe they’d stay there a while, or maybe they’d continue on and sail across the sea and he’d show her the sea cliffs of Lys, and she would climb over rocky islands, and dig her feet into sand.  She liked the way he described sand—dryer than dirt, and warmer in the right light.  She wondered what it felt like—how it could be soft yet harsh but not so harsh as gravel that Mog and the rest mined from Flint.   And even her father’s complete lack of interest and his waved consent couldn’t matter to her, and the next day, she kissed Rodrik again before the heart tree and the gods, and didn’t stop kissing him until she fell asleep with his seed inside her, feeling out of breath, and elated and alive.

The elation fades though.

It always does, for as Arya and Rodrik descend the mountain with his horse, she realizes she will never climb it again, and the years she’d spent learning the secrets of the mountain will be meaningless for the farther down into the foothills they go, with every passing day, everything is new, and flatter and flatter and flatter until there are no hills at all, just waves of land covered in the melting spring snows.

And she tries not to be sad—she does try. And when she kisses Rodrik her heart beats faster, and his touch makes her warm as they fall asleep before their fires.  He does distract her, that much is true, but when he falls asleep by her side, his body warm and relaxed from her, she stares up at the sky and there is nothing framing it, nothing holding it up, it just hangs and sprawls over everything as far as she can see and she misses the way the mountains…

But it’s no use missing the mountains. She has left the mountains. No more a mountain goat, she supposes.  A grasslands goat, perhaps, one day to have kids who shall drink her goat milk.

She almost doesn’t see it at first, so lost are her eyes over the rolling moors, but Rodrik kisses her neck and points to the horizon, and she sees something rising from it.  “Winterfell,” he says.

It’s not a mountain.  Hardly a mountain at all.  But from this distance, she can tell that it is, at least, tall, and the closer and closer it gets, and the higher it rises, until they are in the shadow of the outer curtain wall, and passing through the winter town and all that Arya can think as she looks up at the great stone castle is that—that has so many footholds and handholds and towers and roofs and how wonderful it must be to climb.

**Author's Note:**

> [No](https://adlayasanimals.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/1465675136_12f1db43bf_z.jpg), [but](http://www.odditycentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/mountain-goat8.jpg) [seriously](http://www.webburgr.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/mountain-goats-00001.jpg), [mountain](http://clickcited.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/mountain-goat-3.jpg) [goats](http://slowcoustic.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/sheer_drop-mountain_goats.jpg) [are](http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/10/15/article-1320728-0B9F8225000005DC-23_470x581.jpg) [amazing](http://cdn2.content.compendiumblog.com/uploads/user/a4e707ba-e52c-41ea-b5df-e22be41ea981/4cc0b3b2-3aa5-4c38-8f3b-f31ea00b4f69/Image/c6441c0109763d40658317c060101c22/baby_mountain_goat_kid_with_parent.jpg).


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